Tuesday, February 2, 2016

Politics: #DemTownHall & Trump

It has been another big week in politics--on both ends of the red-and-blue spectrum.

The Democrats kicked things off with a town hall meeting, last Monday night in Iowa. Throughout the forum, Bernie Sanders earned more online mentions than both of his competitors. Below is a look at total mentions during the event, which was broadcast on CNN:

At the same time, both candidates drove so much of their own coverage during the town hall, as these lists of their top tweets illustrate:

On Tuesday, Donald Trump announced that he would be boycotting Thursday's GOP debate. Did that stop the businessman from making noise? Of course, no:

In fact, Trump received 2.5 times as many mentions as all the GOP candidates COMBINED on Wednesday:

And our Word Clouds show the degree to which Trump has filtered into the digital and social media conversations involving every other GOP candidate:

With the developments of this week, Trump may be seen as in a league of his own. The GOP frontrunner states that he does not even have to debate for the title he currently holds, as he effortlessly gains attention with rogue campaigning tactics. Will this lead convert to votes in next week's Iowa caucus? We will find out, most likely next Tuesday morning.

Tech: Periscope with Your GoPro

You no longer need to risk breaking your phone to Periscope an adventure--GoPro has come to the rescue!

The GoPro HERO 4 now allows for broadcasting directly to Periscope for iPhone. As described by the President of GoPro, "GoPro enables people to capture and share their experiences in the most immersive way possible, and the integration with Periscope provides GoPro users with a great, realtime platform to share their content."

So what type of content can we expect from this pairing? Lots and lots of action.

Along with the hashtags in support of the partnership (#GoLive, #GoScopeTV), the X Games are among the top items discussed. While Periscope is allowing GoPro users to stream their content is realtime, it is also generating buzz for current events; the Winter X Games just kicked off yesterday, and this new feature is allowing for all parties involved to grab headlines.

Announcing that she lost 26 pounds on Tuesday, Oprah shared with her 30 million Twitter followers a Weight Watchers commercial in which she says that she is having success without depriving herself of bread. By the end of the day, shares of Weight Watchers skyrocketed more than 20%, closing at $13.29 a share.

In terms of Weight Watchers mentions, Oprah is dominating the conversation. Outside of her tweet, the most popular Weight Watchers tweets this week nearly all mention the personality by name: